I Spent the Day at a Holiday ‘Fat Fair’ in France — Here’s What I Learned

As the end of the year approached in Autignac, in the south of France, posters and signs appeared, advertising something called a foire au gras. The technical translation was “fat fair,” but of course that couldn’t be its true meaning. It wasn’t like people went to holiday fairs to buy fat.

I asked my friend and next-door neighbor Jean-Luc about it one day, and he said that foires au gras were fairs where people went to buy fat.

To be specific, they went to buy duck and goose fat, sometimes rendered and packaged, but more often still subcutaneously a part of the original animal.

Jean-Luc finished his description of homemade foie gras for Christmas dinner and of duck legs, wings, and gizzards encased in an airtight sleeve of solid fat through the winter, ready at any time to be pulled free and crisped in the oven, like the most implausible form of fast food, and how one could use the leftover fat to sauté potatoes to a light crustiness that could not really be achieved by any other means.

He looked at me flatly. I can’t be sure I wasn’t making whimpering noises.

“You should come with us this year,” he said.

The foire au gras was hosted by the village of Sauvian, within sniffing distance, if not sight, of the Mediterranean.

Jean-Luc’s wife, Nicole, offered a half-friendly bonjour to her chosen farmer, already looking over his lineup, not yet ready to commit to the holiday spirit.

There were maybe 30 ducks in his display, plucked, with nubby yellow skin lightly bloodstained in places, their abdomens opened, feet removed, and necks hanging off the edge of the table. These weren’t exquisite little wild ducks the size of small chickens. Foie gras is made from a breed called a mulard, a hybrid of Muscovy duck and a domesticated subspecies of mallard. Mulards have been bred to be freaks. The ducks on display looked like swans.

Nicole asked to see each duck’s liver. She complained that several weren’t fat enough. She felt their throats. After almost 10 minutes, four ducks lay next to the vendor’s scale, and he lightly processed them for her. Yes, she wanted the necks — for cou farci. Neck sausage.

With heavy supermarket bags swinging against our legs, we wandered, accepting marinated olives, slices of saucisson, and sips of wine and eau-de-vie from local producers, who tipped fingers of liquid into clear plastic cups and watched us drink.

We walked past open coolers full of vacuum-sealed magrets — the breasts of foie-gras ducks — shaped like meaty slippers with pale yellow soles of fat. There were coolers stacked with tubs of rendered duck fat. There were whole saffron-colored livers — foie gras entiers — slippery-looking baseball mitts that people pointed to before reaching for their wallets.

There were ranks of big glass canning jars holding confit thighs in fat that looked like vanilla frosting. And smaller glass pots sealed by wire latches and rubber rings, holding morsels of foie gras preserved in a viscous slurry.

On one tabletop stood a 12-year-old cheese like an amber crag. The cheesemaker peeled us each a thin flake, creased and curled like a wood shaving, that tasted waxy and nutty, with crystallized grit that crunched between our teeth. We bought a thin wedge, sliced two-handed by the cheesemaker, who hunched his shoulders high and then worked back and forth through each slice with a knife like a scimitar.

Mary Jo and I needed something for Christmas dinner. 

A turkey felt properly festive to our American sensibilities, though something about it also felt wrong in some way. Like one of those decisions made by committee that is everyone’s second choice.

Still, we were visibly about to agree on one of the turkeys in the display of a butcher wearing a lab coat, who was rubbing his hands together and smiling with that particular school-fundraiser-slash-art-fair mix of avarice and desperation.

“Steve.”

I felt Jean-Luc’s hand on my shoulder. He pointed about three stalls down. “If you are going to spend that much,” he said, loudly enough for the butcher to hear, “you should go look at the capons.”

Nicole jumped in, elaborating on how a turkey breast would get dry, and the legs could be greasy, whereas a capon was practically as big but was full of fat, and it was really in almost every way more of a delicacy.

I tried to ignore the dark look of the man in the lab coat as we and our easy-looking 50 euros moved inexorably away from his otherwise neglected stand.

Our new butcher’s torso ballooned tightly against the constraints of his apron, and he had no time to acknowledge us, occupied as he was with weighing and bagging one fat, trussed yellow capon after another for the customers crowded around his stall.

I had run across the word capon perhaps a dozen times before, and I wouldn’t have said they existed any longer, belonging, rather, to a vanished world in which Falstaff ate at the Boar’s-Head Tavern and called for cups of sack.

A capon was the chicken equivalent of a steer, Jean-Luc explained — a gelded male, who, having lost the pleasures of romance, contented himself with the pleasures of the table, eating to excess, refusing to fight, growing fat. He lacked the wiry musculature of a rooster and, with that, the mature cock’s slight gaminess, which could fight to such a delicious draw with the wine in a coq au vin but made for a dry, stringy roast bird.

I wondered how it was any different from a large broiler chicken.

The man standing next to Nicole, in a cardigan sweater and a beret, held a straw market bag at the end of two extended arms in front of him. “Ça n’a rien à voir,” he offered. (“They have nothing to do with each other.”)

“A capon,” agreed Jean-Luc, “is much larger and fatter.”

“Voilà,” agreed the stranger, whom Jean-Luc and Nicole had now made room for in our circle.

“A capon,” said Nicole, “it takes him sometimes 10 or 11 months to reach the size where he can be called a capon.”

“He is more expensive,” said the man with the market bag, “because he lives longer. He eats more.”

The woman to my left had been nodding and vocalizing little affirmatives, and now, as if she could hold back no longer, she leaned in, reminding us that it was not simply a question of size.

“The flesh is finer,” she said, and everyone, brought back to the main point after briefly straying, offered supportive exclamations: “Eh, oui” and “bien sûr” and “naturellement.” 

“He lives on bread and milk and corn at the end of his life, imagine to yourself,” said Jean-Luc. “Like a spoiled child.”

“The fat is not just under the skin but in the meat,” said the man in the hat. “Like an entrecôte of beef.”

“When you roast it,” said Nicole, “the fat dissolves everywhere inside the bird, and everything is tender.”

“But still firm,” said my neighbor to the left, who was now fully integrated into our conversation. She rubbed her thumb against her four fingers. “There is a firmness.”

“If one could always afford to buy capon, one would not buy chicken,” said the man.

“And one ... would also not buy turkey?” I asked.

This question appeared to upset our four instructors. We were not following the obvious conclusion from today’s lesson.

“You have your holiday in America,” suggested Jean-Luc, as if to pardon us in front of our new friends for this queer taste in turkeys.

“Yes, Thanksgiving,” I said. “We always roast a turkey.”

“It is called again?” asked the woman. “The holiday?”

“Thanks ... giving,” I said. “When we say thank you for the harvest.”

“Ah,” she said. “Well, I would not say thank you for a turkey.”

“But a capon ...” said the man.

“Yes, a capon,” said Jean-Luc.

“Evidently,” agreed the woman.

“What I do,” she continued, “is roast it on a bed of thyme. But it is better to find wild thyme. And old enough that the stems are woody, so they hold the bird elevated above the bottom of the pan.”

“Ah, putain,” said the man, reverting to mild obscenity out of reverence for such a vision.

“The fat drips, the wood smokes, and there is a little bit of smoke and a little bit of thyme in the bird when it is done.”

The burly butcher in his tight apron called, “Ensuite!” and the man touched his cap and stepped forward.

When we had bought our own capon — a rotund fellow shaped like a rugby ball, weighing around nine pounds — we maneuvered our way down a crowded aisle toward the door, weaving among the citizens of Sauvian as they shopped for their holiday fat.

There was a spot I knew, up in the hills. A little hollow between vineyards, where the thyme grew woody and thick.